My Commentary: Do you think NJ’s criminal government will clear the records of those victims they previously kidnapped, robbed, stripped, caged, and extorted merely for engaging in this exact peaceful, victimless activity, before it magically became “legal”? I’m asking for a friend. 😉

(J.D. Tuccille) Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin wants limits on virtual currencies, like Bitcoin, that help people keep their financial lives private from folks like him. Senator Dianne Feinstein wants government regulation of political speech by foreign agents—or maybe just by people with whom she disagrees. Gun control activists want more restrictions with which to threaten peaceful gun owners so that violent predators who break laws will have more things to ignore.

If ever there was a “there oughta be a law moment,” we’re living in it. At least, we’re living in one of all too many such moments. Because people are forever looking to the law as the solution to the ills they perceive in the world around them—often only to spackle over the failures of the previous round of laws. In the process, they’re forever forgetting that laws are usually nothing more than codified prejudices, imposed against resistant populations, by sometimes incompetent and often corrupt enforcers.

(Meagan Flynn) The driving infractions and fines had piled up on Robin Clearey, who stood before Magistrate Joe Licata after she was ticketed for driving without working taillights, a license or valid registration.

he had been through this many times before, she told the judge, and at that very moment she also had a criminal case pending for driving with an invalid license, for which she would stay in jail unless she paid a $3,500 bond. Licata warned her that, if she didn’t pay the fines for these tickets and renew her license after paying surcharges to the Department of Public Safety, “you’re gonna get arrested every time you get pulled over.”

That was nothing to her, Clearey responded — because she had already become trapped in a cycle of arrests.